As I mentioned before, the collection of videos at
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/avi/ seems to be a collection of videos that are broken in all kinds of ways. Nonetheless, I began to document the failure of them on my KDL-46NX720. If the descriptions are a bit vague, it's because I know nothing of video production, encoding, or anything of the sort. I assume that most non-HD video will only occupy the center 1/3 or so of the screen and can only be "zoomed" for the most part, at the loss of pixels. mewmew-ssa.avi was somewhat reminiscent of the issue I experienced with videos earlier. I'll continue to go through the other 40-odd videos at some point, but the issue always seems to be the same - poor aspect ratio at the loss of pixels.
If it's any help, I can attach photos of all of the different AVI display problems I've noticed.
Here are the first few I tried:
2-audio-streams.avi
Only occupied center 1/3 of screen, looks better with "Zoom Option"
ffmp3_bad_rate_detection.avi
Occupies only the center 1/3 of the screen, and doesn't even fill the screen horizontally - pauses after 2 seconds of audio/video and won't restart
filedoesitbetter.avi
No sound, static video display (won't move past first frame), blurry, gray stripes on either side of the video; "Zoom" helped slightly
GoneNutty.avi
Occupies only the center 1/3 of the screen, but a bit better with Zoom (and without loss of pixels)
imaadpcm.avi
Occupies about half of the screen vertically and about 2/3 horizontally; was made better with "Zoom", but the video paused and wouldn't start again after 2 seconds.
mewmew-ssa.avi
Occupies only the center 1/3 of the screen and about half of the screen horizontally; Zoom helped without loss of pixels
mp-avi-demuxer-fail-184453.avi
Occupies only the center 1/3 of the screen, but a bit better with Zoom (and without loss of pixels). Sound was awful.
mp_seek_failed.avi
Audio was out of sync and distorted. Wide Zoom seemed to correct the picture a bit.
Now I recognize that, even in the best case, ffmpeg/Serviio will only work with a tiny fraction of the bizarrely encoded AVI's out there - but we should at least document which ones those will be so that people will be aware of it and can convert or re-encode their content accordingly.